Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor, Softimage|DS, which was a threat to Avid's business. Avid used to sell furniture; they built computers with lots of accessories for handling video into wooden desks. These were called "editing suites", and cost upwards of $100K. Softimage could do that on commodity hardware.
Avid had no idea what to do with the 3D product line. It was a product Avid was stuck with, and it had its own team in Montreal. In 2008, Avid sold that to Autodesk.
Autodesk had developed its own 3D system, 3D Studio Max, which is still around. They bought Alias/Wavefront Maya from SGI when SGI tanked in 2004. That's how Autodesk ended up owning the 3D animation business.
Big studios didn't convert to NT, they converted to Linux. SGI ended their own reign by not being able to compete with Nvidia and AMD/Intel. Even now all those studios use csh since that was the default shell that came with Irix.
Even SGI itself tried not to get left behind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation
NT was a part of the transition for much smaller groups or individuals since they could buy a dual processor pentium II/pro and put a decent amount of RAM in them along with an Oxygen card that would accelerate OpenGL.
Large studios had a huge amount of infrastructure built up in pipeline scripts and workflow, proprietary software that might have used POSIX APIs and GUI libraries that weren't on windows, and big network file systems that tied things together.
I was really sorry to see them go.
SGI thrashed around for years trying to find a niche. They bought Cray, for supercomputers. Didn't work out. They bought Intergraph, which built expensive CAD workstations. Dead end; PCs could do that. They got into servers, but 1U commodity servers crushed them. They made a big commitment to the Itanium, Intel's attempted successor to x86. Failure on all fronts. SGI was in the expensive computing business, and expensive computing was over.
That's what worries Autodesk's Carl Bass. Autodesk was originally, in the early 1980s, the price leader in CAD. The competition was selling high-end workstations bundled with a CAD package. The original big achievement of AutoCAD was cramming large drawings into a 640K DOS PC. It was kind of clunky, but way ahead of manual drafting. An AutoCAD setup was originally about $1K of software and $3K of hardware.
Autodesk has been trying to come out with low end mass market products for years. But there are only so many design engineers and architects. Years ago they had Autodesk Kitchen Designer, for laying out cabinets to fit. Now they have Autodesk Homestyler[1], a phone/tablet app which takes a picture of your room, builds a 3D model, lets you add furniture, and provides photorealistic renderings. It's free, supported by sales from the furniture for which it has models. It's a great piece of technology that's not very successful. IKEA has a competing product, which of course only has IKEA items, and that's more successful.
I agree they made poor acquisition choices, but not that "expensive computing [is] over" -- it's just not the consumer market people thought it would be.
So, it's not quite the same lineage.
The new SGI does seem to have some nice gear, but I don't know how much secret sauce there is. I've never used it, but it looks pretty commodity to me. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).
When Microsoft bought Softimage, SGI freaked out, they feared MS would pull something awesome and make everything switch to x86 for editing.
Then they bought Wavefront and Alias separately, and forced the two to merge, Wavefront had a cool suite of editing tools that was award winning in the movie industry, Alias had a competing suite, the suites had lots of stuff unique to them, they merged the suits and created Maya (example: some of binaries that ship with Maya came from Alias, another ones from Wavefront, the GUI if I remember correctly was designed by Alias, the scripting language and the file formats by Wavefront, and so on...)
Autodesk then just reaped the mismanagement of MS and SGI
Autodesk really has grown mostly by acquisition.
Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X?
There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn".
I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested interests rather than an innovator in themselves.
Now, offering stable products is a good thing for many people. Owning DWG gives them an underhanded advantage though, and slows down the evolution of computer assisted design as a discipline, IMO. The DWG situation weights more in the anti-innovation camp more than a hundred clever Maya plugins.
DWG is considered a "standard" while effectively it's just a black-box binary blob. The prevalence of the DWG format means that either new players in CAD need to licence the RealDWG suite from Autocad, they can use third party reverse-engineered libraries like Teigha or they can hack their own. Teigha has been at it with several hired developers for a decade and they still lack bug-free support for the format. The fun part? Autocad can very well deny RealDWG to anyone they don't like. How's that for a market space for disruption.
It's nice to see there are new things happening in CAD world like OnShape (https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)
Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)
Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.
Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.
They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.
That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.
"the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors."
Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG.
Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable.
Construction industry software is so ready for disruption.
A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.
Auto desk are a vile company. A serial monopolist that make any of the othe offenders look tame. I'd love to see them go out of business. That said, I hope those that have lost their jobs find new ones soon.
I've got years of diverse experience in the field of architecture and software, and Revit seems like a very clever toy but not a substitute for endless labour over details. Good architects draw every brick (or equivalent), and/or they also work in close experimental collaboration with the people fabricating the building elements. I'm thinking in the first case of Caruso St. John http://www.carusostjohn.com/ drawing every brick and in the second of a practice like Grimshaw http://grimshaw-architects.com/ using lost-wax casting (investment casting) to make components. The trade or craft knowledge involved means there are effective constraints which cannot even be expressed in Revit (individual bricks are not really an option in Revit, and you definitely wouldn't want to design a metal casting using Revit... It's an Autocad job, or better, a job for something more expressive like Maya or Mudbox (or whatever it's called) or whatever tool suits your aesthetic. You can't get to Rodin from Autocad.)
Autodesk certainly doesn't think so, at least with respect to people who purchase copies of their software.
Publication list: https://autodeskresearch.com/publications
IMO, main advantage of Sketchup over Autocad are a free API to access the model (although the domain model is not entirely well designed) and a fairly limited context of user interface operations (which makes the learning curve lowish).
The most critical difference though, is that Autocad supports actual analytic shapes while Sketchup handles only boundary representations (i.e. polygon meshes). No real cylinder for you! This may or may not be a problem.
I can't comment on CAD, but in the world of 3D graphics I find SideFX's Houdini and The Foundry's Modo to be way more useable, extensible, and feature rich than Autodesk's Maya.
Autodesks MO for the last couple of decades is to just buy out any competitor in the market.
In architecture and construction they are by far the leader in Building Information Modeling, so i think it depends on what you put in the spotlight.
Revit has come a long way and it's starting to fulfill it's promise, but it's been a slow road.
Now we are starting to develop a replacement using Configura which is a swedish company working on the same space for the last 20 years or so and although they have a proprietary language and no documentation at all, still makes for a much better developer experience and game changing UX where users can design, render photos and produce movies of their project from within the tool. It's a whole different world.
However, both tools are, in my opinion, stuck in the past since I expect to see some competitor coming up in the next few years bringing the same experience in a web environment.
Tools for modelling matter at the nano/molecular scale. Seems pretty far out to me, I get it's just research right now but not many other groups working on this.
Project pipelines: Design information is passed between specialists and project offices. Here DWG - being as popular as it is - is used like a checkin of a git branch - it is as well suited for this as a docx document. People manage, though, with a bit of manual project specific work thrown in. No amount of fancy viewers is going to fix this.
People have started to notice that good graphics are available from 'off the shelf' and that handling the basic geometric primitives is not really rocket science. I'm confident OnShape will be followed by a sleuth of new modeling tools soon - and probabably not from Autodesk. They are too busy protecting their entrenched dominion. I might be wrong though.
Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools.
They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative.